1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for reconfiguring a printer object in a network printing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Network printing systems generally comprise an assemblage of different printers, client computers, servers, and other components connected over a network. A network administrator or user may want to monitor the status of print jobs being printed or the general operational status of the printer. A computer may monitor a remote printer over a network using a network protocol, such as SNMP or TCP/IP, or a line connection such as a parallel port connection.
In a Microsoft Windows NT environment, a client application interfaces with a printer object, also known as a logical printer. The printer object is a software interface to which a driver, output port, and configuration settings are associated. The port provides an interface to a physical printer, which may be a serial, parallel, or network printer. One printer object can be associated with multiple ports. In such case, when submitting a print job to a print object with multiple ports, one of the ports is selected to handle the job.
The client submits a print job, specifying a print object for the print job, to a spooler. The spooler may queue multiple print jobs. When processing a print job, the spooler would determine an available port for the print object, which may have multiple ports. Associated with every port is a port monitor program, such as Local, Macintosh, HP, and line printer daemon protocol (LPR). The LPR port monitor uses the TCP/IP protocol and is typically used to transmit print jobs to network printers over a TCP/IP network. The spooler submits the job to the port monitor for the port. The LPR port monitor maintains information on the IP address or host name of the printers attached to the ports. When the spooler submits the job to one port associated with the printer object, the LPR port monitor submits the job over the network to the printer device having the IP address associated with the port the spooler selected. If multiple ports are associated with a single printer object, then the spooler may select another port if a previous selected port for the print job failed.
In order to utilize a different port monitor device to submit print jobs to printers in a Windows environment, a user must first open the “Printers” window shown in FIG. 1a. This window in FIG. 1a shows one printer object, “Network Printer”. To change the port monitor the Network Printer uses, the user would have to perform several GUI actions to first add a network port and enter a network IP address of the printer. To open the window in FIG. 1b to make changes for a particular print object displayed in FIG. 1a, the user would right click the mouse over the printer object, choose “Properties” out of the pop-up menu, and then choose the Ports Tab. To add a port, the user would then select the “Add Port” button in FIG. 1b. Selection of this button causes the spooler to call the port monitor to put up the Add Port window in which the user may add a port. After adding the port, the port monitor returns control to the spooler which then updates internal data structures to reflect the added port and returns to FIG. 1b. Upon control returning to FIG. 1b, the user may then associate the printer object for which the window in FIG. 1b is open with one port, which may be the new port.
In large network environments there may be hundreds of printers. Thus, in order to change the port monitor for all network printers, the network administrator would have to go through the above described GUI steps to add a port for the new port monitor to each printer object and then reconfigure each printer object to use the new port.
Thus, there is a need in the art for an improved method, system, and program to associate new port monitors with printer objects.